The Hunger

Everyone's heard of the male midlife crisis, but what happens when a married mother of three finds herself drawn irresistibly away from her happy (enough) family—when she decides that she needs one last chance at all-consuming love?

A story like this could start almost anywhere. It could start with the bad, beautiful boyfriend in high school whose betrayal stings decades later. It could start with simmering annoyance at the husband. It could start with the incipient jowl, the first hot flash.

I choose, though, to start my story in Shakespearean style, around the cauldron with the witches brewin' up some trouble. I was a married woman in the second half of her forties, coming off a decade of spartan attention to job, children, husband, hearth. The witches were about my age but all footloose and single. Our cauldron took the shape of three martini glasses; our brew, Absolut. The incantation: their complicated affairs with multiple married men, recited down to obscene bedroom mishaps and delights. In the darkness of the bar, they wove their spell. I sat listening, struck mute, a dullard with nothing to add but the dry toad of my long marriage, which, judging by my friends' tales from the forbidden frontiers of the extramarital tryst, was only a front for male infidelity anyway.

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My husband and I were lovers for years before our marriage, and we still had great sex and a laugh a day. But the long, dark baby years, during which somehow I'd become the earner and he the miserable stay-at-home mom, had crushed the fun out of our lives. Inside the house together with the kids, I felt starved for oxygen, but no amount of jogging could fill my lungs enough to release the sensation of being trapped. I couldn't stay, and yet I couldn't go.

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I wasn't lonely, but I'd lost any sense of romance. Love songs, poems, novels, the mysterious pursuits of the heart—it all annoyed me.

Marriages were collapsing. Every couple we knew was in therapy or breaking up. My best friend had destroyed her marriage for a worthless swain she'd initially described as her "soul mate," with whom she'd had the "best sex of my life." "I saw no reason to deprive myself," she explained, just before her new lover moved on. She's a bitter, gray, fattening single mother of two now.

I thought her an utter fool. Until.

He found me, I'm embarrassed to say, dear reader, on the Internet—Facebook, to be precise. The initial approach was professional but flattering. He'd heard about my work and liked it, and invited me to a conference. His page was packed with pretty pictures of himself. Reader, yes, I went to the conference, not with a goal in mind, but with possibility flickering. In person, I found him staggeringly beautiful. I had to leave the room, to stand outside gulping air. He resembled the bad high-school boyfriend, the mature version. Witty, urbane, the same tall, dark, and handsome. George Clooney with a chaser of Philip Roth.

He also looked a lot like my husband.

At the conference, he gave a speech about our shared line of work. I don't know what he said. He could've been speaking Chinese. All I knew was that his voice affected me like wine and chocolate. In that cold conference room, I was suddenly loosened, languid, and I wanted more. Cupid surely giggled in the shadows behind the PowerPoint. Such a direct and easy hit I was.

He was divorced but had a girlfriend—had had one, that is. A week after we met, he informed me sadly by e-mail, from afar, that she'd dumped him. He was heartbroken.

And so it began, the help-me-I'm-lonely Facebook messages, slowly graduating into (my) e-mailed confession of attraction, followed by "But you're married, aren't you?" followed by our arranging to meet in a city neither of us lived in.

It was a June day, just about the longest of the year. Not wanting to examine too closely how our day would, or could, end, we walked for miles and miles, from neighborhood to neighborhood, until I could barely stand. Swooning, stricken by desire, I kept catching his eye, staring at him like one mesmerized. Later, he'd tell me that he couldn't get "the look" I gave him out of his mind.

I hadn't been on a date for nigh on two decades and had forgotten how it's done. When it got dark, I finally did it: I invited him up to my hotel room. There, I ran out of words and looked helplessly at him, then mashed up against him with a kiss that lasted for an hour. He kept his clothes on but proved a master of blue talk. His fingers wandered south, once. "I want to make you come," he said, "but that seems like crossing a line." We decided it might be best if he left. On his way out, he kissed me standing up and whispered, "We could fuck against the wall." Then he was gone.

I went home to suburbia and a long summer with husband and children, cookouts, fireflies, good clean family fun. Toasting marshmallows, washing dishes, folding laundry, I replayed his last line in my head: "We could fuck against the wall."

All that season my skin was alive, vibrating between the effects of lust and hot flashes. I lounged alongside pools in my bathing suit like an odalisque, oozing unrequited lust from every pore. My friends' husbands glanced at me out of the corners of their eyes, darting gleams of interest.

For months he sent lubricious e-mails with infuriating irregularity, often several times a day, sometimes going silent for a week or two. I'd be picking up a kid from the playground, and the phone would ping, the inbox light up with the subject line "Baby, you're so hot." Soon, the pinging phone was like a drug. I'd see his name, and my heart would literally flutter, my adrenaline surge, my face flood with heat, and then I'd read and reread the usually half-line message until it had gone stale and the time would come to erase it. Which I didn't do frequently enough. I was utterly careless. I started to Skype him on the kids' computer, leaving records of 2 A.M. video conversations with a man in another state.

What was I thinking? The truth is, I was unable to think.

My body was going haywire. A wrinkle was forming between my eyes and grooves growing beside my mouth. Hot flashes slammed me day and night, heart palpitations banged at my breastbone. He had merely to hit the send button, and half a continent away my hormones would surge like those of a teenager, but of course I was going (as I was so depressingly aware) in the reverse direction.

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I was dying. He was my terminal boyfriend. Happiness? I couldn't remember it. It was as elusive as sleep. All that remained was longing, as visceral and cruel as when I was 13 years old, writing poems, listening in the night to the lonesome train whistle and thinking about the redhead in math class who'd never notice me.

We agreed to reconvene at another conference in another city.

After two days of keeping him at bay, I invited him to my room on the final night, and we at last did the deed. He lay beside me, naked, talking dirty, but…with a bendy dick. Fuck against the wall indeed! I didn't know what to do, so I pretended, and so did he, and eventually we fell asleep. In the morning, he skulked off before daylight, with the excuse that he didn't want the other conference attendees to see him leave my room.

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Did his impotence repel me? Did it jolt me to my senses, remind me that I had a loving man in bed beside me every night? Oh no, it did not. My aging Orion, my flawed dream man! Now I adored him even more!

He disappeared then. I could tell by his Facebook posts that he was passing time with a girlfriend in the city where he lived. I was crushed. I worked out at the gym—hard, smashing myself against the treadmill—trying to forget about him as I kickboxed and sobbed. I had a lot of work to do, and I plunged through it like a wild horse. Friends thought I seemed strung out, but my husband and children noticed nothing amiss. I cooked massive dinners, kissed our sons good night, made love to my husband, no more or less passionately than ever. And then, when everyone was asleep, I'd sneak outdoors to light up one of the cigarettes I'd quit so long ago, to gaze at the moon and cry.

I was in over my head, swimming in hidden grief. In the mirror I saw what I was becoming: a caricature of a middle-aged woman, pining away for Romeo. I was the overage seductress; the jealous, weepy mistress; the character in a Latin soap opera, all lipliner and wrinkled cleavage. If he had hove into view during that time, I would have beat on his chest and pitched myself to the ground.

When Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coined the term "midlife crisis" more than 40 years ago, he was describing a gender-neutral life stage, but it quickly became popularized as a male phenomenon. The symptoms were melancholy and boredom, followed by flashy cars, hairpieces, and running off with pretty young things. Women, it seemed, didn't need midlife crises because they already had a word for their situation at the same age: menopause, with its well-defined symptoms heralding cronehood. Females in midlife crises get depressed and gain weight. No red Maseratis for us.

Well, different times, different symptoms. Fifty is the new 40, and my husband was my wife. I didn't gain weight and I still had most of my youthful looks, but I started to torment myself pondering the numberless, awful ways that the aging woman becomes ridiculous and undignified, while the 50-plus man gains power and recognition and sex appeal. Viewing the life cycle from a different perspective now, I recognized that I'd been happiest in my midthirties and early forties, holding all the cards of beauty and fertility—and now I was folding. The further away that bright shore of youth gets, the more desperately one struggles to reach it. I saw this but couldn't stop myself; I'd fight the current until spent.

A few months later, he reappeared in the inbox with more filthy talk and a suggestion for yet another tryst. Without mentioning the bendy-dick incident, he wrote that he wanted "a do-over" because "neither one of us was at our best."

I didn't recall being at anything less than my best, but I accepted the challenge. We met at a hotel in yet another city in which neither of us lived. He met me at the train station. I didn't recognize him at first. He was just another old man.

He handed me a rose in a sandwich bag that he said he'd plucked from his own garden. Back at the hotel room, he had his do-over, acquitting himself nicely. When I left the next morning to bring back coffee, he had the bed made and sprinkled the white comforter with the rose petals.

At home again with husband and children, I was not wracked by guilt, as surprising and reprehensible as that might sound. It was more a feeling of being physically torn in half between my real life and the one I desperately wanted: in bed with my lover.

I got terribly sick and stayed sick for weeks. Lying in bed, I'd check his Facebook page and admire his lovely pictures and think about Death in Venice. Was he my Tadzio, the beautiful boy, leading me to the end?

When I got well, I bought some hypnotherapy to try to cure the craving for his attention, the addiction to his e-mails. It didn't work. That season, I turned 50, grieving the easy happiness of earlier times, tussling with Eros and Thanatos day and night. I was infused with a tragic sense of this man being the last opportunity I'd ever have to feel beautiful and desired.

My lover was old too. "Wish we had been young together," he'd say, his kind eyes mournful on the Skype screen. Sex. Death.

The last time we were together, we lolled in bed for three days, using up condoms and, I guess, all his blue pills. Between sexual bouts, we talked and talked. I wished then that I could record every word for later study. It was like we were characters in My Dinner With Andre. Our conversations were mundane yet intricate, heavy with enigmatic meaning, worthy of archiving for future analysis.

At one point, he said, "Tell me a joke." I couldn't think of a single funny thing to say. Our love was too grave. I'd once laughed with and about him. Now I could barely smile in his presence.

My witches knew all about my amorous adventures, and they disapproved, but at least I had something to talk about besides school meetings and reading delays. They had plenty of opinions—about his sexual malfunction, for one. "So many of these guys are dead below the waist," one observed. "You have no idea what it's like out here!" Another opined that if I were going to risk my marriage for an older man with iffy equipment, I should at least select someone of considerable means.

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How does it end? Does Mrs. Jones see the error of her ways? A combination of contempt, bred of familiarity, and my own exhaustion gives the story a coda, I suppose.

I didn't see him in the flesh very much, but we Skyped regularly. Reclining half-dressed, in bra and underwear, I caught myself in the tiny square, still looking young, and could see his eyes on me. In those moments, I languished in a glorious pasture of narcissism, feasting on his undivided attention and compliments.

After a while he grew comfortable enough around me to prepare and scarf his gross bachelor food (chicken bone boiled in a pot with a raw onion and some decayed broccoli, or bratwurst in a tortilla) on camera, washing it all down with gulps of beer. The way he hoovered up his food and slurped the beer reminded me of my own husband, on his off days.

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He also got comfortable enough to whine about how badly women treated him. He'd been victimized, by his ex and by a cast of half a dozen postdivorce girlfriends. He was desperate to find a real, lasting love with someone worthy and true who was, he said, "hot and smart." I was meant to know I possessed those qualities.

But nothing pisses me off more than a six-foot-plus-tall white American male with advanced degrees and money in the bank moaning about being the victim of a woman. Where had I heard all of this before? Right in my own house!

At those moments, I caught a glimpse of what the wife who'd left him must have seen. The midlife male lover is a fabulous idea—until he morphs into the next husband, one you didn't plan to marry.

The spell broke for good when I realized I'd joined a stable of varied and willing women. He had Facebook girlfriends all over the country, a cult following. That was fine—how could I argue?—except for the unacceptable equivalence among us all. I knew from the start that I needed him to think me Special. Everything hung on this, my last chance to be someone's princess.

But he was on his own desperate midlife crack-up. The few times we were together, he'd eventually roll over and start playing Words With Friends (with benefits) on his iPhone. He let it be known that a corporate girlfriend at Microsoft had sent him a ticket to Tahiti right after we'd seen each other. One night we left our bed long enough to go to dinner. I went to the bathroom and returned to find the pretty blond waitress talking to him about aphrodisiacs.

The same awesome, gorgeous availability he'd projected at me emanated from him all the time, directed at all women, in all directions. He was, in short, a pro. The rose petals on the bed. The sext­ing. The easy dispensation of outrageous flattery. If a friend had described that shtick before I met him, I would've rolled my eyes.

Time was running out for my lover, too. He was terrified of dying alone and leaving what he felt was an unfinished life, and he was spreading his seed far and wide in a last-ditch effort to turn away from the foggy shore. We were driven by the same fear, the emptying hourglass, but our solutions, such as they were, were at odds. My experience of the midlife crisis was to find myself hurled back to my adolescent self, with surging hormones, gushes of tears at hearing Peruvian pipes of pan or elevator Muzak, poetry flowing from my fingertips, and the conviction that somewhere, someone waits who will make me the One.

Around then, my husband started to look a lot better to me. For one thing, I didn't care as much about his issues anymore, having found a specter much more compelling and horrifying on which to focus. And he, having surely sensed the emotional distance, had somewhere along the line changed his ways and was trying to please. He even went to a shrink, got treated for anxiety, and started paying some of the bills. Here again was the amusing partner in crime I'd hooked up with in college, the guy whose dry wit lit me up at least once a day. He still held my hand all night and rubbed my shoulders. His eye, if it wandered, did so discreetly. He thought I was the One.

Do I sometimes leave the party, as I did often that year, to check for messages from my lover, to stand alone outside gazing at the moon and soaking up the immense tragedy of it all? Yes. But the cellular longing for him is spent; like the hot flashes, finally at bay. The great transforming change has, apparently, been accomplished, and I'm on the other side.

Was there a purpose in all this, some lesson behind the unrequited longing, bad timing, and sense of loss? I have to think so. Had I not met my lover, I might never have rediscovered the depths of feeling I thought I'd mothballed forever in the attic of my romance-addled teenage self. Cracked open, I understand the poets again.